


i’m just a kid of ill repute (and this skin i wear is my only suit)

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Series: from our invincible heights [1]
Category: Kingsman (Movies), Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-26 21:43:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12067551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: “This is a disaster,” Anakin huffs out a near laugh, passing his remaining grenades to Obi-Wan.He accepts them with a grin and a few spare magazines for Anakin’s pistol, bumping their shoulders together. “This is fun.”





	i’m just a kid of ill repute (and this skin i wear is my only suit)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [penandpage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penandpage/gifts).



> prompt fill for the single greatest prompt I have ever gotten in my entire life

Yspara panics and pulls her chute seventy-eight meters above the radar line, and just like that the pool of prospective Lancelots dwindles to only two.

There is barely time for celebrations, or for goodbyes; they are offered twenty-four hours of downtime before the final test, whatever it might be, but given only five of them. That night, the call goes out that the arms dealer their agency has been pursuing unsuccessfully for nearly two decades now has landed at a private airstrip just outside city limits. All agents respond.

 _All_  agents, the closest handler stresses, pressing guns and borrowed body armor at the two trainees - one of them will be seated at their table by dinner, and no better test than the actual field of play. Instead of academic rigor or the ability to improvise, their final test is a covert assassination.

The body falls with its finger on a dead man’s switch.

Galahad says his farewells with a brief salute as he throws himself down on the live grenade.

* * *

Mace takes the assignment of Lancelot, ceding the unexpected opening of Galahad to Obi-Wan; it had seemed only fitting, given that the predecessor had been his mentor.

He is allowed the remaining sixteen hours of his downtime to grieve, and then he reports to work.

* * *

Galahad the Previous, who Obi-Wan had known for the past eight years as Mr. Jin, had given his life over to their agency long before doing so in practice, and so the settling of his affairs takes an afternoon at most. The few personal items in his house, beyond all the furnishings that came with the building, were boxed into a single cardboard cube and taken to the mansion HQ for storage. The house itself passed along with the title.

By the time Obi-Wan’s first day as a proper Kingsman is drawing to a close, nothing remains of the man who was his father in everything but name save a single medal, yesterday’s date stamped across the back, and a tentative knock on a downtown apartment door.

“It’s a bit late,” the woman inside informs him, feet and hands planted just so to keep the door a steady, unwelcoming half-closed, “to be selling something.”

In eight years, Mr. Jin had never once mentioned being married.

“It’s about your husband.” He thinks that maybe, probably, there’s a better way to go about this conversation. Maybe, probably, if there were a better man than him to have it.

She blinks, expression gone from suspicious to outright distrustful, and the door closes a larger fraction than before. “I’ve never been married.”

Obi-Wan caught Mr. Jin’s eye all those years ago for one reason alone, and it had not been his ease with people (it had been computers, of all things, and the way he could see past a scattering of parts and pieces to a final conclusion). “I apologize.” He tries to step back enough to eliminate himself as a potential threat, but there’s just not enough landing and he almost trips over the first stair. “I must have the wrong house.”

“You don’t.”

The voice is small, smaller even then the boy who it belongs to, a wisp of sand colored hair and spring colored eyes that appears in the doorway behind his mother with a sad, serious expression. He takes in the lines of the suit, the set of the glasses, with quiet contemplation. “Mr. Jin just helps out,” he says in that same voice, a frown tugging like he already knows the reason for the late-night visit. “He’s my friend.”

Obi-Wan crouches down to eye level without a second thought to how he might be supposed to be acting. “He was my friend, too,” he admits quietly, because sixteen hours was not nearly enough.

The boy sighs. “He’s dead, isn’t he.”

It isn’t a question, and Obi-Wan doesn’t bother to answer. Instead he presses the medallion into the boy’s small hand, and tries to smile in the way his mentor always had - like everything was going to be okay. “If you ever need help, you call that number,” he instructs, “and you tell them-”

“I already know the code phrase.” The boy wrinkles his nose around the interjection like it’s something that should come as obvious; he is the most precocious child that Obi-Wan has ever encountered, and he thinks he understands Mr. Jin’s interest. The boy could be anything he wanted and could probably be the best at it.

“What’s your name?”

The boy switches the medal from one hand to the other so he can offer a proper handshake, fingers barely visible beneath the sleeve of the too-long pajama top. “Anakin Skywalker,” he shakes with precise, practiced rhythm, too perfect to be natural, like he’s following some sort of script. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi.” He can feel exactly how close to the ground he’d pulled the cord of his chute in the way his knees protest him standing, and suddenly the last twenty-four hours feel a hundred times longer. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.”

* * *

He’s in Brussels when he gets the call, a return to HQ marked urgent/emergent, but the memo of a ‘sick cat’ has him pulling up a video conference rather than a plane ticket.

“Oh good,” he wryly greets the shadowy figure that fills the screen of his glasses. It’s early rather than late evening, but there’s a strict curfew enforced on the trainees in their dormitories - lights out at 2000, no exceptions. There are also strict rules regarding the clearance levels required for access to open mission lines, but he supposes that’s part of the problem. “You’re still alive.”

The screen shifts from vertical to horizontal as Anakin repositions his tablet against - a pillow, Obi-Wan assumes. “Of course I am. No one actually dies during these training exercises.”

It’s an exercise in willpower - and in his eleven years now as a gentleman spy, emphasis on the ‘gentleman’ aspect - to keep from pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “You jumped out of a plane.” It says a lot about his life, or rather a lot about his recruit’s, that there’s already an established code phrase for that.

“To be fair, five of us did. It was a sanctioned skills test.”

He gives in to temptation and presses a thumb and forefinger against the pressure points above his sinus, doing little to relieve the headache that has been a weekly occurrence for over a decade now. “The other four had parachutes.”

He can’t see Anakin’s shrug, but he can hear it in the smugness of his voice, the way his words stretch languid like the cat he was coded as. “It worked though,” the only part of him visible in the low lighting is a flash of teeth in a wild grin. “The jet pack.”

“I genuinely hate you.” The sad part is, he can’t even bring himself to feel a modicum of surprise anymore - it’s not the first time Anakin has done any of this, the jumping from planes or the testing of a homemade propulsion device ( _jet pack_ , he boxes the word away, back in a corner of his mind and hidden behind the swelling pride he feels), and if all goes according to his own plan it won’t nearly be the last. For not the first time, he wishes Qui-Gon were still here; he was always so good at reining in reckless genius.

Another smile that is more heard than seen, and another budding headache. “We are men of action, Ben. Lies do not become us.”

“You’re a pain in the ass,” he chides with no small amount of fondness. “Do  _try_ and behave until I get back.”

* * *

“Did you plan this?” Mace - he’s never been Lancelot, not to Obi-Wan. After everything they went through together before and after earning their seats at the table, there was too much between them to be summed up in codenames. - accosts him before the door of the plane is even opened.

It’s been a long,  _long_  fifty-three hours. “Which part?” he asks, genuinely curious, then adds a “But assuredly I did not” without having to know an answer. Whatever has happened since the last time they spoke, none of it has been even in the vicinity of to plan.

“Nominating him now. For this.” There have been four trials in the eleven years since Anakin first appeared at their secret, but apparently not childproofed, base, wielding an innocent smile and Obi-Wan’s name like a weapon.  _The electrical grid_ , he’d told them when they’d asked.  _No building this size could use the amount of electricity it does without numerous subterranean levels._ The only reason they’d never tried to get him down in their Merlin branch was the way that he simply... refused to stay there. It’s only this one, now, that Obi-Wan had put forth his name into the pool of candidates.

Fifty-three  _and a half_. “Yes, because I  _planned_  for that house to have claymores in the front yard.”

“ _Agravaine_ ,” Mace stresses like it means something. “Sounds like aggravating. Rhymes with ‘a pain,’ as in my ass.”

In a rare moment of ungentlemanly behavior, Obi-Wan snorts. “Oh. Yes. That actually  _was_  planned.”

* * *

Anakin shoots the dog.

And Obi-Wan, well, he hadn’t been  _worried_  exactly (he had, and desperately so. Anakin is a sharp mind and a sharp tongue cocooned in so much softness that sometimes he thinks the boy could be molded like clay.), but he still releases a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding as the gun is offered back stock first. “How did you know they were blanks?” he asks instead, prepared to learn about the difference in weight or smell or even shape of it all that gave it away.

“I didn’t,” Anakin looks genuinely surprised, and offers the still-full magazine hidden in his sleeve with a sheepish shrug. “I switched them out one-handed when you weren’t looking.”

* * *

His first mission, he jumps out of a plane without a parachute.

“ _Agravaine_ ,” Obi-Wan chastises over the comm, and ignores the pointed stare Mace sends him from across the room.

* * *

Anakin is a full-fledged knight now, and a - regrettably, by their standards - talented one, but there still hasn’t been a seat at the table offered for him (for  _Agravaine_ , they assure him. Nothing personal, it’s just that the round table of legend sat only twelve).

“Our table’s not even round,” he explains when Obi-Wan finds him later, perched on the roof. “And it seats twenty-one, counting Arthur.”

Obi-Wan, fresh back from a mission in the Sudan, clasps his shoulder. “Have I told you recently,” he begins, lowering himself slowly to sit on the ledge beside Anakin; his skin is nearly as red as his hair, product of a desert mission gone not quite to plan. “How proud I am of you?”

“You have to say that, you’re my mentor or whatever.” There’s a disconnect even to the chip on his shoulder, like that too is something borrowed. Their order was founded by the uppermost of crusts, knights forged in blue blood and bone china rather than struggle and steel like he had been. It was no secret that Anakin was not a lord or a count or in any way related to one; he was a bastard son of an unknown father, saved from an abusive stepfather by Galahad the Previous and raised by a single mother on a council estate, and frequently reminded that this world was not one he belonged to.

“I say it because you are my friend. And because it is the truth.” Gentlemanly honor aside, Obi-Wan speaks with the surety of absolute belief, like he’s not so much speaking his mind as he is the laws of the universe: the sky is blue, the earth is round, and he is proud. “You’re an exceptional young man, Ani, and a credit to our agency.”

* * *

Arthur assures him of much the same, when he meets with him a week later.

* * *

Agravaine and Galahad are sent on a mission working as partners, and it’s... Anakin probably shouldn’t consider it  _fun_ , seeing as it’s political espionage with a side of potential assassination, but he does anyway.

Obi-Wan is an absolute nightmare to share space with, strict with his quiet and his cleanliness and even the channel on the television, everything so exacting that it’s almost easier to start a fight than attempt to follow his rules. And Anakin, in return, is too much -  _too_ loud,  _too_ messy,  _too_ relaxed, despite their situation, too contrary only for the sake of it. They yell and they argue and they nearly come to blows, and when their cover is blown halfway through the gala dinner they fight back to back and check the other for injuries in the elevator.

“This is a disaster,” Anakin huffs out a near laugh, passing his remaining grenades to Obi-Wan.

He accepts them with a grin and a few spare magazines for Anakin’s pistol, bumping their shoulders together. “This is  _fun_.”

* * *

Arthur passes down his orders, and offers him a place at the table.

* * *

It takes two years, but eventually he realizes that he’s friendly with all of the other knights.

Not  _friends_ , not really - he works well with them on missions, trains with them easily when they’re not, and he spends just enough time with them around HQ that he thinks maybe, finally, they might be getting along. But they’re not his friends, not where it matters.

His mother gets remarried and brings in a pair of younger step-siblings, and he perfects the jet pack for short flights, and Threepio takes a glancing kick during a domestic mission that has him limping for five whole days, and Anakin goes three days without sleeping and another thirteen without smiling and none of them notice.

(Obi-Wan notices, but it’s always been different with him. He’s always been the only one of the bunch that Anakin considers as identity first and agent second.)

* * *

“Who do you  _work for?_ ” the man repeats his question for the third, and apparently final, time. “I won’t ask again!”

Through the cracked, too-low angle view of his glasses, strewn abandoned on the floor beside the chair, they watch him grin around a mouthful of blood and bad impulse control. “Who do you want me to work for?” Anakin coyly asks his kidnappers, accent crisp and sharp in the way it only is when he’s being tortured, and it earns him another broken finger.

Obi-Wan gives in to the temptation of the past thirty-seven hours and pinches away the headache against the bridge of his nose, interrupting the feed he’s refused to pass off to one of the handlers. “Don’t antagonize the terrorists,” he laments into a mug of cold tea. “I know it comes naturally to you, but it-”

 _What?_  Anakin signs one-handed, left arm slumped down against his leg to bring it in better focus of the hidden camera.  _It might make them hurt me?_  It speaks volumes toward both his personality and his pain tolerance, that the sarcasm comes across despite everything.

“No, it’s just... tacky,” he finishes lamely. “Come on Agravaine, give me some specifics.” Anakin lets out an unprovoked, uncharacteristic yell of fear when the kidnapper stands, and rolls his eyes through a series of  _please don’t hurt me please don’t hurt me_ ’s before falling into an equally sudden silence. The camera catches the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and the twitch of his four broken fingers. “That works for me. ETA eight minutes, fourteen seconds. And Ani?” He waits for the eye contact through the feed before continuing. “Try and cooperate until then.”

* * *

Anakin wakes up in medical with a tube down his throat and a prototype prosthetic attached below his elbow.

“What absolutely infuriates me,” Obi-Wan greets him with a glass of water after the nurse removes the breathing tube, holding the straw steady until he manages a few, coughing sips. The metallic joints of the false hand do not squeak as he tries to move them, but emit a faint humming noise that will have to be looked at before he’s released. “Is that I know that  _was_  you being cooperative.”

“My psych eval says that I have no respect for perceived authority figures,” he grins, but pats Obi-Wan’s arm as best he can through bandages and narcotics. “Thank you, Ben.”

The faint humming noise ceases when he returns the gesture. “Get some rest, my friend.”

* * *

Anakin spends his third anniversary as Agravaine at the range, retesting for his firearms certs.

“You mean to tell me,” Percival looks absolutely  _crushed_ , “after all this time, that you’re actually  _left-handed_?” He’d only just managed to wrestle his records back during Anakin’s rehab, and even then it had been a near thing.

There is a small row of AC electromagnets set beneath the palm of his prosthetic, tuned to a matching row in the stock of his pistol, to help him stabilize around the new weight, but his kidnappers had hardly been the first to incorrectly assume which side was his dominant. “Galahad taught me to shoot right-handed when I was twelve,” he doesn’t answer, and switches from the false grip to the flesh-and-bone one. “I like the challenge.”

He obliterates the old records.

* * *

The first day he meets the Tristan candidates is the day they choose their dogs, and he’d never admit to anyone that it’s not the people he drops by for - the worst kept secret at their organization was Anakin’s fondness for their animals. “How are they doing?” he greets Lancelot, who lowers his clipboard with a glare.

“Don’t talk to them,” the older agent warns. “Don’t even breathe near them. The last thing any of us need is another one of  _you_ running around here.”

It is, oddly enough, what passes for affection. “What makes you think I’m the only one?” Anakin smiles in return; Obi-Wan might have been the one on the line during his rescue, but Mace had been the one kicking down the door. He’d volunteered for the away team as soon as the bag had been thrown over Anakin’s head. “I’m not even the  _first_ one of me.”

The conversation pauses as the alert comes across both of their glasses, and the smartscreen of the clipboard: Galahad’s mission in Beruit had ended successfully after blowing up a three-square block of the city.

“I wish I didn’t know either of you,” Lancelot says, and Anakin offers his unspoken thanks for four months ago by not laughing in his face.

* * *

The second time he meets the Tristan candidates, there are only four left.

He doesn’t know anything about any of them, but he knows which one will win - a young woman, the daughter of a Swedish ambassador, called Padmé.

* * *

Basic mission ideology aside - she favors diplomacy and discretion, he leans more toward ingenuity and explosions - Anakin and Padmé make a staggeringly good team. Their first mission together is an almost effortless success, as is their second, and Anakin has always chafed at being put with another knight on missions - like they don’t trust him, or trust his abilities, and he works alone unless he absolutely has to (and then, he works with Obi-Wan) - but by their fourth mission in as many months he finds the idea almost enjoyable.

Padmé, it seems, does not.

“What is wrong with you?” She’s wearing six inch heels and a six thousand dollar dress, dripping with diamonds and indignation, and they made it through only two courses before the black tie event tilted more toward black ops. She’d slipped out a side door quietly - he’d plowed like the proverbial bull in the somewhat literal china shop through half the crowd. “Were you raised in a barn??”

“Basterfield House, over at Golden Lane.”

She ducks beneath his arm to aim a brutal  _ushiro geri_  into the diaphragm of the man who was sneaking behind them, using the same motion as leverage to pull into a lightning quick duckunder that has him over and out before Anakin can process he’s even there. It’s the mix of fighting styles - traditional martial arts with television media wrestling - that makes her feel more approachable than she ever has before, human in a way the other knights just don’t. “You told me,” she blows a bit of hair out of her face, glaring up at him with fire in her eyes, “that we were hoping for a  _diplomatic solution_.”

“And,” he assures her, “I’m sure we’ll get one.” He clicks the safety off his pistol and readjusts a few of the throwing knives he keeps in his dinner jacket. “We just need to engage in a bit of... aggressive negotiations.”

* * *

Anakin goes to visit his mother for the first time in six months and can’t find a single trace of himself in her house. The walls are covered in family photos in a way they never used to be, showing a smiling, dark-haired family in various stages of their life together, and he wants to be angry but he  _can’t_ \- not when he’s never seen his mother happy like this before.

He sits down at a table between Edern and Owen, the boys he has meet only twice now and cannot see as anything other than strangers, and he swallows the feeling of intrusion he feels around the walls of his childhood memories. After dinner, he goes back to his apartment that has slowly become his home and, ignoring the time zones, call Obi-Wan.

“I suppose I just feel... replaceable,” he admits in a way he never would if this were a video call; the story was easier to tell when he didn’t need to to see anyone looking back at him, didn’t need a reminder that sometimes it wasn’t solely about him.

Obi-Wan clears his throat, and Anakin recognizes the sound as one that would be accompanied by a comforting touch if there were not continents between them. “You mother loves you, Ani.” Obi-Wan speaks with the surety of absolute belief. “You’re following separate paths now, but that doesn’t change her feelings for you.”

“She’s forgotten me.” Anakin does not drink, but there are times he wishes he did; this, and the dinner before, are perfect examples of them. “Will you forget me too one day?”

The following silence is a physical presence, filling the empty seat on the couch beside him. “I don’t think I could,” Obi-Wan finally answers, voice rough, “even if I tried.”

* * *

Anakin sleeps with Padmé in Paris because he thinks he might be in love with her.

 _Thinks_.

His frame of reference for love is limited to the protective sense of obligation he feels toward his mother and Threepio, the confusing tug of duty and delight that he feels about his job, and the way that he cannot purchase furniture without knowing that Obi-Wan hates it.

There are also the half-remembered stories of his childhood about princesses and knights, the ones he never cared much about until now. They go a little bit something like this: fast heartbeats and sweaty palms, all the adrenaline of a firefight with none of the fear, only with far more magic and happy endings. (They do not feel like trying too hard and still failing, or just never getting it right.) 

He thinks that maybe,  _maybe_ , he is in love with her.

He sleeps with her again in Madrid because he wants to be sure, and again in Cartagena, guilty because he is not.

Whatever it is, love or otherwise, it doesn’t last longer than a few months - it’s too easy to fall into bed with something that makes you believe you might grow old one day, to escape reality for a few hours at a time. It’s harder to wake up and remember that reality is all you ever get.

* * *

They find out about the chips entirely by accident.

A UN Secretariat named Dooku, either through his own invention or that of the company his family owns, has weaponized a radio wave first tested in Bosnia - the frequency causes mindless violence in humans, overriding any higher level of thinking beyond bloodshed - and implanted it into the free SIM cards his company has given away en masse.

His motive remains unknown. The projected casualties innumerable.

His downfall, as many have done previously with Anakin, comes from a miscalculation of the dominant hand.

Padmé -  _Princess Amidala_ , Anakin corrects, still unable to stomach the revelation that woman he knew as the daughter of the ambassador to the Swedish king was, in fact, the daughter of the king himself - tells them of her meeting before the plane has left the runway. “He plans to cull the population,” she finishes, lips gone white around the edges from pinching tightly around the idea. “He asked me to join him.”

Obi-Wan looks quietly furious. “Are you alright, Tristan?” He does not seem particularly surprised to find out who she is, and in a single moment of clarity Anakin realizes he’s probably the only one of them - of their four, perhaps of their entire order - who did not know.

“They just let you leave?” Mace’s anger is more palpable, curling with distrust into the lines of his brow; there’s an insinuation creeping around the corners of their conversation, one that only he seems brave enough to address.

Padmé holds herself with the grace of a princess and the poise of a soldier; unyielding. “He showed me what would happen,” she passes over the cell phone almost like a challenge, the video playing on muted, grotesque loop. “If I didn’t agree with him.”

Even without the sound, the explosion that takes out the man’s skull is deafening.

“We have to stop this.”

* * *

The mountain base is cold and isolated, far enough outside of anything at all that the waves of violence will not reach them. It’s a surprise then, when they land and find the men stationed within as armed as they are.

Dooku’s men move like clones of each other, a hivemind of coordinated attacks with a conglomerate puppetmaster pulling the strings - they act like they share one mentality, which he supposes in some way they do; it’s why they’re here, after all.

It takes the four of them to secure the hanger before they split into pairs, one to stop Dooku and one to stop his army; they have just enough ammo for maybe one hundred targets between them. With an infinite honeycomb of hallways beyond there could be ten more or ten thousand, it’s impossible to know, but the simple fact of it is that they are tragically, terrifyingly outnumbered.

Obi-Wan finds one-fifth of the kidnapped delegates on the fourth floor, locked behind steel doors and triple-sensitive locks.

Mace and Padmé find the remaining four-fifths on the highest level, armed to the teeth and preemptively celebrating their victory.

Anakin has spent sixteen years inside an agency that believes in the preservation of life at all costs, and six years bleeding for it. He has learned to differentiate between a human being’s unalienable right to survival and that of humanity’s, and that sometimes the balance of the scales is not between life and death, but the few and the many. A political presence to prevent civil war. A single CEO to prevent chemical fallout. One life for many, because even living has a price.

He detonates the chips.

* * *

The conspiracy’s reach is far,  _far_  greater than they could have imagined.

* * *

Later, when he wades through the tide of bodies strewn in broken, bloodied pieces across the floor of Dooku’s base, he turns to meet Obi-Wan’s gaze and finds it averted for the first time in as long as they’ve known each other. “We could have saved them,” he shies away from the question like he does the hand at his arm, flinching like he’s never done before. “Anakin... we could have  _saved them_.”

The thing is, Anakin knows it. He knows it just as well as Obi-Wan knows they couldn’t have done it in time to save the rest of the world.

“I did what I had to do.” His words and his consonants are clipped, sharp in the way they only are when he’s being tortured.

“You did what you have always done!” He’s  _survived_ \- it’s all he knows how to do. To take the world and what it offers, the good and the bad, and bend it to his will to carry on living.“Whatever you wanted, and damn the consequence!”

“I made a choice-”

“You played at God!” He’s known, of course, that Obi-Wan has a temper. It’s almost legendary among the knights, the way the most stoically proper of them can erupt like a volcano, both cold and hot all at once and infinitely devastating. He’s known, of course, but never seen it - not once, in all sixteen years, had Obi-Wan ever raised a voice against him. “You have always seen yourself as someone above the rules, someone too good for the world around him.”  _You’re an exceptional young man, Ani_ , a previous truth echoes.  _I’m proud of you_. “You are not infallible, Anakin, and today... today you have failed spectacularly.”

They do not speak to each other again, and when they reach the plane they retreat to opposite ends until the stony silence has built an impregnable wall between them.

* * *

Mace won’t even look at him.

Padmé does, just once, and looks like she might throw up.

And then she does.

* * *

When everything is said and done, when the dust settles and the death toll peaks, Anakin allows himself a single moment of regret to curl up in tortured agony on a couch in the library - Threepio stretches, oblivious, at his feet.

“Agravaine?” One of the handlers, a newer one promoted only in the aftermath of the destruction, raps her knuckles against the door frame for his attention. She stands meekly with most of her body in the hallway, hesitating from either fear or unfamiliarity, and he’s not sure which idea he hates worse. “Arthur wants a word in his office.”

 _Of course he does_ , Anakin swallows around the lump in his throat,  _I just took out a third of the population of the planet like the bloody plague._

“Of course he does,” Anakin grins around the lazy smile on his face, “I just saved the bloody world.”

The halls of HQ are quiet, solemn from the loss of their own and the untold devastation beyond, and it seems even longer than usual to make the trek up to Arthur’s private office; the room feels older somehow, when he enters it. Hollow like a church. Stale like a tomb. “Anakin,” Arthur’s voice is warm, like his smiles and his eyes, when he looks up to see who has arrived. He’s always been like this, almost fatherly toward Anakin, or at least what he imagined a father would act like if he had one. “Take a seat, my boy. I’d like to discuss something with you.”

He takes the offered seat and the drink that follows it, and doesn’t panic when Arthur mentions what happened with Dooku. “The loss of life is almost unfathomable,” he begins, soft and warm enough that the guilt doesn’t settle like a stone in Anakin’s chest, “but that’s not what worries me most. Seventy-three percent of the world leaders were killed, either by Dooku’s hand or the chips we detonated... so far they all seem too distracted by the casualties to think much ahead, but...” He pours Anakin another few fingers of scotch. “We are looking at anarchy on a near global scale, with the threat of economic and societal collapse.”

Anakin isn’t sure if it’s the alcohol that burns on the way down (he’s never much cared for heavy spirits) or the acceptance that everything they’ve done - everything  _he did_  - could possibly have doomed more than it’s saved. “What can we do?”

Arthur meets his gaze with a stern, serious question in the set of his brows. “ _We_? Nothing, my boy. The world doesn’t need a shadow agency, it needs a unifying leader. It needs a  _savior_.”

It’s one thing he and Obi-Wan have always agreed on, the simplicity of computers -  they way they can see past a scattering of parts and pieces to a final conclusion.  _Arthur_ , he thinks with the same acceptance he’s taken any of this with: both a healthy dose, and hardly any at all.  _The Once and Future King_.

All roads, he supposes, have been leading here.

“The people need a king,” Arthur extends a hand. “And every king needs a champion. What do you say, my boy?”

He says nothing. Mostly, he considers - the way he’s tired of being wielded like a gun, aimed and assigned blame, and the way he’s never been loyal to the organization so much as he’s been to a handful of the people who make it up. The way Arthur has always been kind to him, even when the world has not, and the way that same world now needs as much kindness as any one man can offer. The way that Padmé had looked at him in horror, and Obi-Wan in betrayal, and Mace in disgust.

Mostly, he considers the stories his mother used to tell him, about kings and knights and champions, and how he can’t see himself as any of them.

He says nothing, but he raises his glass and lowers his head in a mock bow - he can’t find himself in the legends of old, but he finds he can all too easily imagine a leader like Sheev Palpatine.

“Long live the King.”


End file.
